> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on mus

> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point: This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated. There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see. That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to. The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior. To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.